Sean Evans, host of the cult US online TV show Hot Ones, is trying to recall his highlights from its four seasons, in which he has interviewed celebrities including Cara Delevingne and Seth Rogen. But he concedes: “It’s kind of a blur. There’s been so many people spitting in buckets, dry heaving and coughing. It’s all just one big fit.”

Yes, you read that right: spitting, heaving, coughing. For Hot Ones is no ordinary chat show. Instead, like a sadistic Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, it involves Evans firing questions at celebrities as he and they eat 10 chicken wings dressed with hot sauces of increasing ferocity. The final wing is dressed with Hot Ones’ own Last Dab, made with the world’s hottest chilli, Pepper X. By this point (note: DJ Khaled bailed after just three wings), most guests are in a whole world of sweat-soaked pain. Or, as Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s game star Terry Crews put it: “OH MY GOD … you get high off this shit. My voice is changing. You’re turning into three people, man! I’m hurting. Why can’t I open my eyes?”

Yet, in the subcultural realm of hot sauce challenges, Hot Ones is tame. It gets the big figures (2.5m views and upwards), but out there, in the wilds of the internet, there is a small army of exhibitionists who feel compelled to film themselves testing such hardcore sauces as Black Mamba 6 Get Bitten or Hell Unleashed. A jalapeno might register 8,000 Scoville heat units (SHU), but these thermonuclear sauces made with concentrated capsaicin extract (the chemical that gives chillies their heat), hit 5m and 6m SHU – more than double the heat of the notorious Carolina Reaper chilli. Such sauces are frequently marketed with sensational legal disclaimers (part genuine safety advice, part circus hype) that – witness the crying, gagging, puking and emergency-milk-chugging on YouTube - are blithely ignored.

Eating ludicrously hot sauces appears to be broadly safe. The more chillies you eat the greater your tolerance becomes (as capsaicinoid compounds kill off the relevant receptors in your mouth), and serious medical complications or deaths due to anaphylactic shock are extremely rare. But this heat-seeking scene is damaging in one way, and that is in undermining hot sauce’s culinary credibility.

“We’ve got 20 of what we call the ‘ring-burners’ and ‘chuckle brands’,” says Doug Bell, owner of the Lupe Pintos delis in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but he is bemused by their popularity. “Personally, I don’t like sauces with extract in. It’s pure essence of heat. I can’t pick out flavours in something that hot.”

Bell first discovered hot sauce in the 1980s in New Orleans, where it is treated reverently. He would much rather enthuse about El Yucateco’s smoky, wood-roasted Habanero Black Label Reserve than discuss the latest Man the Fuck Up! or Ringstinger, much less watch people goofing around on YouTube with Mad Dog 357 Plutonium No 9, a 9m SHU chilli extract. “It’s like people who slam tequila. It takes away the passion for tequila as a wonderful drink. Hot sauce is an incredibly big world with loads of flavours and variety.”

Increasingly, Britain is recognising that. Thanks to the recent rise in popularity of US barbecue and global street food, the British hot sauce scene has exploded. The Man v Food generation is keen to explore beyond the ubiquitous sriracha, and a raft of new flavour-focused producers have emerged to satisfy that curiosity. From urban sauces in hip packaging, such as Glasgow Mega Death or Liverpool’s Howl at the Moon to Ooft! (an unusual aged-daikon creation made in the Scottish Borders) or the output of South Devon Chilli Farm, most corners of Britain now have their own interesting hot sauce. Stuart McAllister (“I’ve a collection of several thousand hot sauces”) has run the importer and online retailer Hot-Headz since 1994. This recent surge in interest is the strongest he can remember.

Mark Gevaux, AKA the Rib Man, is one of the prime movers in this new scene. He sells rib rolls at Brick Lane market and West Ham home games, but is, arguably, best known for the sauces he created to dress them, including one called Holy Fuck. They will be going on sale in butchers’ shops nationwide (“I’m not going near any supermarkets, they can do one”) and his online sales were up 50% last year. Little wonder, given how obsessive people are about his sauces: “I’ve got a customer who puts Holy Mother of God in his porridge. He says it’s amazing.”

William Gardner, the creator of hotsaucereview.co.uk, uses hot sauce almost every day to pep up anything from a fry-up to a Thai noodle salad. He describes his love of the “chilli high” (the painkilling endorphin rush that your brain produces because it thinks your mouth is literally on fire) as an addiction of sorts: “It gives you a small buzz, like when you’ve done a decent amount of exercise.”

But, equally, Gardner is fascinated by flavour: “My favourite sauces – and there are hundreds of good, small British producers – have a natural flavour. They’re well-rounded and don’t use artificial ingredients, including chilli extract. Globally, the differences are profound. Caribbean hot sauces generally use scotch bonnet chillies, which have a fruity, citrusy flavour, whereas Mexico also has smoked chipotles and quite herbal chillies. In the far east, they tend to use searing-hot bird’s eye, balanced with lots of garlic.”

“The big name sauces always have that gluey, wallpaper-paste vibe going on,” says Dalston Chillies’ Ben Kulchstein, which is why this lifelong vegetarian has been making his own for years. Three years ago, he went full-time and is now making more than 3,000 bottles a week. The scotch bonnet-powered Original Hot is by far Kulchstein’s bestseller, but that’s not, he insists, solely because of its heat. “Scotch bonnets have this intense, massively spicy flavour. It perfumes the whole room. They just happen to be hot, too.”

The exciting thing about hot sauce at the moment, its fans will tell you, is not heat, but the way people are enhancing and exploring its potential flavours. For instance, in London, sisters Jugpreet and Jot Sandhu make Baj’s Blazin’ Dad’s Original, a Punjabi-style sauce distinguished by its use of green-finger chillies, tomatoes and garlic. In recent decades, major brands such as Maggi (which makes a masala chilli sauce) have popularised western or east Asian-inspired hot sauces in India, but the Sandhu’s recipe is an old one from their dad. “In the Punjab, our family owned a chilli farm. It’s in the blood,” says Jugpreet.

“People are doing stuff with dried and fresh fruit,” says Kulchstein, “smoking ingredients before they cook them or roasting onions and garlic to the point where they’re almost black, so you get this sweet, charred flavour through the sauce. They’re putting their heart into this.”

This explosion of creativity is frequently compared to the craft beer scene, and there is considerable crossover and collaboration between the two. Dalston Chillies’ Original Hot is used in Brewdog’s bars and Kulchstein has previously created an IPA sauce with Dalston’s 40 Foot brewery. In south London, Hop Burns & Black sells vinyl, beer and hot sauce. “All powerful mood enhancers,” says co-owner Glenn Williams who, with his partner, Jen Ferguson, has created beer-infused hot sauces and chilli beers with breweries such as Brixton, Brick, Elusive and Fourpure. In Scandinavia, “craft hot sauce” producer Midsummer has been collaborating with arguably the world’s coolest brewery, Omnipollo.

In terms of using hot sauce, you might think of it mainly as a condiment, drizzled on scrambled eggs. “If you haven’t had Valentina hot sauce over popcorn, you haven’t lived,” says Ferguson. In steak sauces or with mayo on a sandwich (such as a New Orleans’ po’ boy), it can be a useful ingredient, too. “We use a Louisiana hot sauce in our BBQ beans, chipotle in our chilli con queso sauce and Cholula in our chilli, with chocolate and IPA,” says Richard Coates, consultant chef at Bodean’s BBQ restaurants. “And you couldn’t claim to be an American restaurant without the classic Buffalo wings sauce of hot sauce, butter, vinegar and tomato.”

LOL-tastic as Hot Ones and such online challenges can be, the future of hot sauce is one of pleasure, not pain. Is it time to turn up the heat in your kitchen?

Hot take: three best buys

Sainsbury’s Hot & Smoky Chipotle chilli sauce 160g, £1“You expect supermarket sauces to be full of rubbish, but this tastes really natural. It has a strong chipotle flavour and, for a quid, you can slap it over anything.”